by Wally Lamb
Giving birth to people’s pictures turned out to be therapeutic. Those mail-order customers were all so trusting and vulnerable. They gave you their names and addresses and the moments they most wanted to keep—babies squatting on potty chairs; grandparents slicing through anniversary cakes; half-dressed lovers asleep in bed. On third shift you could go outside during break and listen to the waves—close your eyes and still see all those people’s happy times in your head.
Within three months of my employment, I quit smoking, opened a checking account, and petitioned successfully for unlimited shopping privileges. Developing pictures further reduced my craziness—shrunk it down like a tumor. It was a matter of perspective, I began to see. The whole world was crazy; I’d flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist. There was a man from South Hero, Vermont, for instance, who liked to photograph his cocker spaniels in military uniforms and lingerie. And a woman from Detroit who took close-ups of bugs crawling over people’s faces. Smiling amputees with their wooden body parts in their laps, senior citizens standing on their heads: seeing what people wanted pictures of amazed me. We weren’t supposed to mail back the pornographic ones; we were supposed to send a polite little Xeroxed apology. “We regret that federal law prohibits the distribution of salacious photographs through the United States mail.” But I usually snuck them through. I felt a kind of obligation to those people who trusted me with their asses and erections and opened-up legs. Who was I to criticize someone else’s choices? Who was I to judge?
There was this one couple, Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Fickett of Tepid, Missouri, whose rolls of film came across the continent at the end of each month with unswerving regularity. Thirty-five-millimeter prints, a thirty-six-exposure roll, ASA 100. The Ficketts liked to photograph each other in coffins: eighteen shots of Mr. Fickett and eighteen of Mrs. Fickett. The coffin styles and the Ficketts’ outfits changed from month to month. One month they’d be lying in a polished ivory casket wearing formal clothes. The next month they’d be stretched out in a plain pine box, dressed for the beach. Here’s a curious thing: Mr. Fickett always kept his eyes open and Mrs. Fickett kept hers closed. One month they were both naked, but with their hands crossed discreetly over their private parts (which was okay to develop and send). Mr. Fickett saw fit to enclose an accompanying note. “To Whom It May Concern: These pictures are for an experiment in living, not private enjoyment. Please forward without judgment. Sincerely, J.J.F.” By then, everyone at the lab knew to save the Ficketts’ order for me. I’d begun to feel as if they and I had established something between a business acquaintance and a friendship. To tell the truth, I was a little put off by the stuffy tone of that note.
* * *
In December of that year an unanticipated Christmas card from Daddy threw me into a minor panic and I discussed with Dr. Shaw whether or not to send one back. “Well, how do you feel about your father these days?” Dr. Shaw asked. “Let’s start there.”
“What are my choices?”
“I don’t see it as a matter of choice. Your feelings are facts. You’ve come to understand that you loved your mother—love her, still—despite her limitations. You’ve come to a similar conclusion about your grandmother: she’s not perfect but she tries to do her best by you. How about your father? Do you love him?”
“I think . . . I think I pity him.”
“Pity,” he said. “There’s control in that statement. Power. What do you want to do with this power you now have?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, one of your options would be to contact him, try to reestablish your relationship with him. Or, rather, to establish a different kind of relationship. Is that something you’d like to do?”
“No. I don’t think so. I wouldn’t be able to trust him.”
“What would you like to do, then? Picture it for us.”
I closed my eyes and saw a crowded department store. My father and I and Dr. Shaw were three Christmas shoppers there, strangers to one another, passing randomly without recognition. “I don’t want to send him a card. I just want to let go of him. Can I do that?”
“What do you think? Can you?”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to look at him. “Sure. Why not?” All that afternoon and evening I kept stopping and wondering why Dr. Shaw had been one of the shoppers.
* * *
My falling-out with Dr. Shaw four months later—my letting go of him—may have been worse for him than me. He was the one with tears in his eyes. “You’re hard on shoes,” my mother used to tell me when I was a little girl. I was hard on mothers, too.
“How are things going at the halfway house?” he asked me at the beginning of what turned out to be our final session.
“I’m definitely thinking of moving out. Those people are crazier than I am. DePolito’s driving me nuts.”
“All in good time,” he said. “Those people help support you.”
“I support myself. They’re making me second-shift assistant supervisor at the photo lab. I’m getting thirty-five cents more an hour.”
“That’s nice. Congratulations. But what I meant was, they help support you emotionally. They help you cope.”
“I support myself,” I repeated.
“You missed your last appointment. You were angry with me the time before because I accused you of holding back. Then you stood me up.”
“I’ve been busy,” I said.
“You’ve been rebellious. A typical teenager.”
“I’m not a teenager. I’m twenty-four.”
“I wasn’t speaking about chronological age. You know that.”
“Look, I’m tired of this whole thing,” I said. “Over four years of this mother-and-daughter stuff. It’s starting to seem kinky or something. Embarrassing. Sometimes I don’t think it’s even helped that much.”
“How much do you weigh, Dolores?”
“One thirty-eight.”
“And that doesn’t make you happy?”
“I lost the weight. You didn’t.”
“I’m not suggesting otherwise. You should take full credit for your accomplishments, which are considerable. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
I lit a Doral. I’d started smoking again after my first session with Nadine, my psychic. She was the real reason I was fed up with Dr. Shaw. I was sick of my stupid past; I wanted a line on my future.
“I see you’ve picked up the habit again.”
“Just for when I’m nervous. These things are like smoking straws.”
He steepled his fingers.
“Anyway, I’m thinking of quitting.”
“It would be healthier. The nicotine is addictive. And it doesn’t take away your feeling of edginess. It adds to it.”
“Quitting this I mean. Quitting you.”
I savored his stunned reaction. “I . . . I always thought that was a decision we would come to mutually.”
“I’m in outreach,” I said. “I don’t need your permission.”
“I know that. Does Mrs. Sweet know? Have you written to her yet?”
“I’m going to. I plan on it.”
“I think you owe her that. As a courtesy. And I think I owe you the benefit of my professional opinion, which is that we still have some crucially important—”
“Guess what?” I said. “I have a psychic.”
His head tilted questioningly, birdlike. “A sidekick?”
“Psychic. With a p.” His startled look pleased me.
“Male or female?” he asked.
“Her name is Nadine. Why?”
“Why did you go to a psychic?”
“Some of the people at the photo lab went to her. Why does anyone go to a psychic? I wanted to find out about my future.”
“You create your own future, Dolores,” he said. The same old blah-blah. I got up and walked to the window. “Sit down, please,” Dr. Shaw said. “I’d like some eye contact here.”
“I don’t feel like sitting down.”
“Well, indulge m
e then.” He said it in his fed-up, parental voice. I flopped down in the recliner, legs over the side.
“You create your own future, Dolores. I thought you had come to understand that. You build happiness out of insight and good habits.”
“Like flossing my fucking teeth?” I said.
He gave me one of his patient sighs. “I feel a need to clear the air,” he said. “Let’s do a few cleansing breaths together.”
We’d been doing them together since my “birth” five years earlier. “No thanks,” I said. “I’m clean enough.”
“I’m hearing sarcasm again, four-letter words. You haven’t been wearing that defensive armor of yours for a long time.”
“Look, I know I create my own future, okay? I just went to Nadine’s to find out what I was going to come up with.”
He got up, yanked a Kleenex from the box, and began dusting his rubber-tree leaves.
“What happened to eye contact?” I said.
He sat back down, looking at me without saying a word.
“You don’t leave your name or anything when you make an appointment. She didn’t know me from Adam.”
“And what did she tell you?”
“She told me there had been violence in my childhood. She said it had been very painful to me.”
“That’s a highly interpretable remark,” he said. “Show me a childhood without some sort of violence. Show me a painless childhood.”
“She told me I had undergone enormous physical changes. Now how would she have known that? It’s not like I pulled up my sweatshirt and showed her my stretch marks.”
“And what did she say about your future?”
“That happiness was looking for me if I was ready to receive it.”
“You orchestrate happiness, Dolores—you work at it. You don’t catch it as it hurls toward you like a football. If you’re going to be your own person, if you’re going to support yourself, as you say—and I’m not talking about thirty-five-cent-an-hour raises—then you’ll have to stop consulting charlatans.”
“You know what your nickname is at the house? Charlatan Heston—the doctor who likes to play God.”
He closed his eyes, but I could tell he wasn’t visualizing. “You frustrate me,” he said. “This feels like a betrayal.”
“If this is a guilt trip, it won’t work. You’re not my mother.”
“No?”
“Nadine said I was a born artist. She held my hands and felt real talent in my fingertips, the actual vibration of it. You never even ask to see my work.”
“You never communicated that need. I always assumed your . . . your drawings . . . were something you wanted to pursue on your own. I’d love to see your machines.”
“You said to stop bringing them to sessions. You told me I needed to engage outwardly.”
“I didn’t know before today how important they were to you, artistically. When can I see them?”
“Your voice sounds fake,” I said. “You’re insulting me.”
“So let me get this straight: would you prefer that I see the drawings or that I not see them?”
“It makes no difference to me is what I’m saying. I’m tired of all this. I’m sick of your voice, no offense. I’m sick of looking at Old Lady DePolito and her bald spot. I want to live in a place where I can have a bedroom-door lock. Where I can be my real age and not have to pretend some man is my mother.”
That’s when I saw his tears. “Well,” he said, “feelings are facts. How many . . . works have you accumulated?”
“I don’t accumulate them. I create them.”
The answer to his question was thirty-six; that’s how many finished Etch-a-Sketch works I’d done. I stored them in the attic at the halfway house on a plywood table held up by two sawhorses. The ones I was still working on, I kept under my bed. Whoever was on housekeeping duty knew enough not to vacuum in my room. It was one of the house rules.
After my first couple of months of Etch-a-Sketching—after no one else at the house would even pick it up and fool around with it because I was so much better than everyone—I began to walk to the park and work there. Sometimes people would stand behind the bench where I was creating and watch quietly—strangers at first, then regulars, people who perked up when they saw me coming. They brought me coffee from the store across the street. Everyone was hushed and respectful while I worked. One woman kept saying she was going to write to the “Mike Douglas” show about me, that she could just see me Etch-a-Sketching on “Mike Douglas.”
Sometimes I took requests: Elvis, Jesus, Archie Bunker—people had to supply me with a picture to go on. One day in the park, Al, a regular, put an album cover, Santana’s Abraxas, next to me on the bench. “Okay, hot shot, draw this,” he said. I resisted at first, but everyone kept begging me. In the middle of it, it began to look so much like the original that I held my breath. When I finished, Al held out a twenty-dollar bill and I handed over his reproduction. The others clapped and cheered. I bought two more Etch-a-Sketches with the twenty.
At the library I found a book called The Great Artists and began Etch-a-Sketching works of art: Degas’s ballerinas, Modigliani’s stretchy-necked women. Most of the people at the outreach house liked my van Goghs the best; ever since that song “Starry, Starry Night,” we all kind of thought of Vincent van Gogh as one of us. Fred Burden even bought the album; we played it over and over. Poor, gentle Fred. He used to like to go with me to the park while I worked, but I just couldn’t respond to his crush on me, couldn’t separate his gentle nature from that incredible acne—the deep pits and crevices that studded his bluish face.
One time when Fred was thumbing through the great-artists book (I’d bring it back to the library every two weeks on the due date, then sign it out again before I left), he saw a picture of van Gogh’s painting Starry Night. He hadn’t realized it was a song and a painting, he said. I Etch-a-Sketched it and gave it to him for Christmas.
He cried when he saw it and kept it displayed on a TV tray in the rec room with a gooseneck lamp shining on it. “So the whole house can enjoy it,” he announced. Then one evening Mrs. DePolito, off on a rampage, picked up Starry Night and shook it free. That made Fred cry again, only this time with a steak knife in his hand. “Let me at her!” he screamed as several of us held him back. “Let that bitch over here so I can hack her fucking ears off and ram this knife in her fucking gullet!”
That night rocked me badly, rocked all of us. We’d all known Fred as such a harmless soul. They took him away for weeks and took away the regular silverware, too. From then on, for the rest of the time I lived at Project Outreach House, we had to eat with those throwaway plastic picnic utensils—the kind where the fork tines snap somewhere around your fifth bite. It had all started over my artwork. Well, mine and van Gogh’s. But Dr. Shaw dismissed it as Fred’s Christmas-season depression.
* * *
“Nadine felt talent right in my fingertips the second time I ever saw her,” I told Dr. Shaw that last day. “She was sensitive to it.”
“The second time? How many times have you seen her?”
“Three.”
“And how much does she charge you for a visit?”
“How much are you charging Geneva Sweet for me?”
“Mrs. Sweet is billed by the institution, not by me personally, as you know. Do you feel this Nadine person is actually helping you?”
“I don’t feel she is. I know she is.”
“More than I’ve helped you?” His face was flushed. It was the most powerful I’d ever felt with him.
“As much as you have.”
“In three visits?”
“Yup.”
He leaned back in his recliner and closed his eyes. “‘Your children are not your children,’” he said. “‘They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.’”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I lit another Doral.
“It’s from The Prophet. Kahlil Gibran.”
“Yeah, we
ll, if it’s supposed to make me feel better . . .”
“It’s supposed to make me feel better,” he said.
He opened his eyes. “Dolores,” he said, “as your therapist, it’s my obligation to tell you I feel you’re making a mistake. May I say why?”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Knock yourself out.”
“Because you’re not ready. You’ve come an amazing distance, but we still have some critical issues left to deal with.”
“Such as?”
“Such as your father. Such as your relationships with other people.”
The cigarette quivered in my hand. “My relationships with other people are fine.”
“Yes, you’ve done very well with that. You’re well-liked at the house, and by your coworkers. But you’re a healthy young woman, Dolores, and I imagine that at some time in the future, you’ll want to become sexually active. And at the moment, you’re still vulnerable because—”
I already wanted to become sexually active. Was active, up to a point—that’s how much he knew. I’d tongue-kissed with both Dion and Little Chuck in the chemical room down at the photo lab—had flirted and lured them in there and then yanked their hands away from anything more than what I felt like doing. What was so vulnerable about that?
“So what are you saying? I’m supposed to come running in here and ask your permission or something if some guy and I decide to—?”
“What I’m saying is that we still have work to do.”
“It’s the bicentennial, Dr. Shaw. I want to be independent.”
“I’m trying to teach you how to be.”
“I already know how to be. Look, all this talking isn’t going to change anything. I’ve already made up my mind.”
He got up and began dusting those rubber-tree leaves again.
“You just dusted those about two seconds ago,” I pointed out.
He reeled and faced me. “Well, that’s my prerogative, isn’t it?”
“Okay. Pardon me for breathing,” I said. “So when should we stop?”
He sat back down in the recliner and closed his eyes again. “Well, Dolores, I believe we already have.”